


Haunted

by l00ps



Category: Original Work
Genre: Disturbing Themes, One Shot, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 16:40:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20474216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/l00ps/pseuds/l00ps
Summary: A short story based on a writing prompt:"Forever shall their ghosts haunt me, like a painful memorial etched in my soul."





	Haunted

I am plagued by the ghosts of those who do not know me. 

They plague me like blind men asking for alms. They do not see me, but I see them with my own inactions. I give no alms, for I have fashioned myself as a man who does not exist in the plane of the living whom they call for. I do not have anything to give, but I hear them just the same.

I hate my ghosts, and yet I call them mine despite not being theirs, for I hear their cries. Their voices linger and look for someone else that isn't me. Their fingers are cold, and in search of their loved ones, they sometimes pass through me, leaving me stifled and petrified. They do not speak to me. They do not put their blames on me, for they do not know me, but I know them. 

They are everyone I never helped. I have watched them suffer, fashioned myself as a living ghost. They have died but death merely made their presence stronger. By death, they now exist in the plane I have existed in. They haunt me. 

Laurel cries for her husband who left her, for her children who never visited her, and for her neighbour who might join her soon. She does not call for me, the man who passed by her house for nearly ten years, who always saw her knitting alone on her porch, with a cat that has a fur as white as her hair.

"I could have helped you." I sometimes tell her when I see her weeping on her porch, long after she was buried. "I could have helped you." I often repeat, but despite being a ghost, she does not see me - the living ghost. I have fashioned myself a ghost and yet I am unseen by those whom I call my kind. 

Owen and Veronica are the youngest among those who haunt me. They are the kids of my alcoholic coworker, John. They are the sweetest, often merely just playing a game of hide and seek. They call for their mother and never of John, their father, and comfort themselves when no one answers back. They cannot see me. I do not know if they can hear me. I am afraid of talking to them and saying, "I know your father, do you want me to take you to him?”. It is only John who I know, and he is not a good man. Can real ghosts feel fear? Can they feel my guilt? 

But, out of all of them, my oldest ghost is Emma. She is perpetually twelve years old. She was never in my class but I know who she is - she who has lovely wide brown eyes and a tuft of untamable blonde hair. I still remember how I saw her saying goodbye to her friends and getting into a blue car with a man with cutting blue eyes, and never seen again. I remember how my parents tucked me in every night after that, and how the school gave her a memorial that still hasn't ended.

"I could have done something." I tell her, always, whenever I see a blue car and her saying goodbye. Always just a goodbye. "I could have."

I am plagued by the ghosts of those who do not know me. Their memorials are forever etched and ongoing within my mind, soaked with tears of other men and women - but never of mine. 

I am, and was, a ghost. I could have done something, but I hadn't. Like them, I will forever call for those who cannot and will not hear me. They call for the living. They call for those who are not me. I hear them, but they do not hear me.

I was unseen, and I am still.

Haunted.


End file.
